Future proofing your website
If you are considering refreshing your current website or in having a new site built, it is in your best interest to hire a designer or firm that will build you a future proof site that is designed to web standards.
I first read the term future proof in relation to websites in Jeffrey Zeldman’s book Designing with Web Standards. Zeldman’s premise is simple. Current web pages work in current web browsers, but if you want to insure that your site will work with future web browsers then then building a standards compliant website is the best bet. A good way to think of web standards is as a building code for web pages. Houses built to code are more sound than ones that aren’t. The same can be said of websites. However, unlike building codes that are enforced, web standards are voluntary.
The idea behind web standards arose out of the nightmare of incompatibility between how web pages designed for one web browser displayed in a competitors browser. That period in the mid to late nineties was call the browser wars. It was hell for web designers and expensive for those who hired them.
The combination of corporate competition and lack of recognized standards made web design much more difficult than it had to be. It was sometimes necessary to craft two different pages for the same content. It was completely necessary to write redundant scripts to enable extra functionality in web pages.
The short version of the story tells us that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published web page specifications HTML XHTML CSS that have been gradually, if unevenly, adopted by the major browser developers. The good news is that the most recent versions of web browser do a pretty good job of adhering to web standards. No browser yet incorporates all of the recommended specs though some are better than others.
While browser developers have put a great deal of effort into updating their web browsers, web designers have been much slower to follow suit. Web pages designed using less than standards compliant code still pretty much display the way they are intended to. And since the average visitor can’t tell the difference anyway, lots of people don’t bother to follow the standards. Doing so requires a higher level of knowledge and is frankly more work.
The why of web standards compliant sites
If visual display on desktop computer screens was the only important consideration there would be little motivation, other than pride of craftsmanship, to build standards compliant web sites. For the business web site there are, however, other concerns. The first of which is search engine optimization.
SEO
In the early 2000’s Google fundamentally changed the web. People began to rely heavily on search engines, especially Google, to find content. Search engine optimization (SEO) became a consideration for all websites, and a crucial one to many. For a number of technical reasons, a well designed website that fully complies with web standards will place higher in searches than one created from the older tag soup design.
Non browser browsers
In June a 2007 another fundamental change in the way people browse the web was introduced, the iPhone. iPhones were not the first cell phones to incorporate a web browser but they were the first to make the experience of using that browser easy and pleasant. How long it will take for cell phones to make a measurable impact on web browsing is open to debate. That it will is inevitable.
Already the Japanese are buying fewer computers than they used to. According to Associated Press writer HIROKO TABUCHI:
The PC’s role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, and digital video recorders with terabytes of memory.
Granted, the Japanese computer usage trend is not yet as evident in the rest of the world, but the writing is on the wall. As more and more gadgets, from smart phones to game consoles to embedded web clients take the place of the personal computer the needs of websites will change.
The future is here
Fortunately, there is a reasonably simple and currently available solution to the upcoming web page needs, a well constructed, standards compliant website that separates the display of content from the structure. Such websites can be made smart phone friendly relatively easily. The same can’t be said of table based or non-compliant websites.
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Tags: future proof, sites, web design, web designers, web standards, websites